A short story, about 3500 words.
Donte is a veteran and a colonist on a struggling new world under a hot young flare star. For most of the colonists, the struggle is in coaxing crops out of the alien soil and avoiding the radiation of the flares. But for Donte, he must also deal with the lingering trauma of war — and a body that feels skinned alive without the armor he once wore in the army.

Donte Barnes pilots the tractor through long shadows as the blue sun lowers itself toward the horizon. His hands are gloved even though the day is hot; they itch incessantly. He grinds his teeth and resists the urge to scratch. Every day is an endless series of resistances like this one. Experience tells him that scratching will only make the pain worse, so he carries on, finishes plowing the row he was working on and pulls up to the farmhouse.

The farm is a co-op, huge and sprawling and subdivided into thirty plots for thirty different crops. The homes of ambitiously-named First City, more of a village, stretch around it in a narrow ring. If you were to see it from the air—and Donte had, when he first arrived—you’d swear it was about to break.

Jorgen Samuelssen ventures out onto the covered porch to meet Donte as he comes in from the tractor. Jobs normally rotate in the co-op, but Jorgen is always in the kitchen. Yes, cooking is what he does best, but he is also safest inside, out of the punishing deluge of ultraviolet Sapphire pours down upon Cradle. Jorgen is the only person other than Donte on the south side of First City who covers himself completely when he goes outside, and unlike Jorgen, Donte insists upon working outside—the unofficial uniform of the colony is tank top, shorts, and dark skin, the darker the better. Pale-skinned applicants like Jorgen are discouraged from immigrating, to minimize casualties from sunburn and skin cancer.

But Cradle is not a popular destination, and Jorgen was the first qualified chef to apply, and it took only a little convincing for the colony managers to clear him to immigrate. Standing on the porch, Jorgen wears the same covering as a conservative Islamic woman might, but his head covering thrown back in the shelter of the porch.

Donte wears the same covering, day and night, out and in; the sun is not why he goes covered. Covered, he itches; uncovered, the pain demands so much medication he might as well never leave his bed.

“In for the day?” Jorgen asks, holding a bottle of local banana beer out to Donte.

“No,” Donte says, but he takes the beer. “Got one more row left. But the itching…” he lets his voice trail off and takes a sip of the beer. It’s cool and light; the way they brew it hardly develops enough alcohol content to notice. It also doesn’t demand much more than bananas and water to make, two things the colony has in abundance.

“Itching’s bad today?”

“Driving me crazy.”

“As long as it’s still driving and you haven’t got there yet,” Jorgen says, and opens his own beer. Donte looks over at him, frowning, but the other man is sipping his beer and doesn’t notice. He probably didn’t mean anything by it, Donte thinks. But I’m so damn tired of the crazy war vet stereotype.

What makes it so annoying to Donte is that the stereotype almost fits. The itching does drive him crazy sometimes; there are days he doesn’t leave his house, but instead stays in and takes enough medication to reduce himself to a stupor. His Veterans Administration paperwork declares him disabled, but the frequent appearance therein of the word ‘psychosomatic’ follows him like a doom, a curse that barred him from the many colony worlds he’d have chosen over this one. Cradle is undermanned, desperate for people; five years out of the six it has existed, its population growth has lagged sorely behind projections. Few people want to go to a young planet circling a young star, to deal with heavy UV and vulcanism and flares. There are nicer worlds to break ground on. The very fact that Cradle was and is unpopular, however, had made them willing to take a chance on a crazy vet with phantom pain syndrome, yet no amputations.

“No, I haven’t gotten there yet, Jorgen,” Donte says with a sigh, and drains half the remaining beer in a gulp. “You’re safe from me.”

“You know I didn’t mean it like that, Donte,” Jorgen says. “In fact, I was hoping you’d talk about your troubles a bit. Talking about anything makes bearing it a little easier.”

“What’s to talk about?” Donte says. “I damn near lived in my armor for two years in the war. And when I was wounded, they took it from me. When I developed this phantom pain thing, they wouldn’t give it back.” He dangles the beer bottle over the side of the porch rail by its neck, wondering if it would break if he dropped it on the hard earth.

“And so you feel as if you’ve been skinned, all these years.”

“All these years.” The two men finish their beers in silence.

“One more row, Samuelssen,” Donte says. “Tell someone to open up the garage. I’ll bring the tractor in, in fifteen minutes.”

Jorgen watches Donte’s draped and veiled form climb back up into the tractor’s seat, lifting his hem to avoid stepping on it.

“You’ll have to tell me more than that one day,” he says to the sunset, once the tractor’s engine is running and he’s sure Donte won’t hear.

#

The next afternoon brings a flare warning. The volatile Sapphire is ringed with monitor satellites orbiting close in, almost skimming the fusion fire. When early signs of a brewing flare erupt, the signal races to Cradle and the warning sirens sound; those who are outside have only minutes to find shelter. At the call of the sirens, Donte is close to one of the shelters in a field of rice near First Landing River. The door of the shack is standing open and he climbs down the steep steel staircase behind it, into the cool. There are only a few other people in it when he arrives. They trade hellos gingerly; everyone knows he goes covered but most of them still feel it’s strange. Donte does his best to ignore it (like the itching, it follows him everywhere) and pours himself a cup of water from the hand pump near the chemical toilets. He picks a spot far from the door and sits down on the concrete floor to wait. Most flares last only an hour or two.

As with all flares, many people are caught farther from shelter than others. The ones still out when the flare hits don’t drop dead, they make it to shelter also; they’ve just had a dose of radiation, maybe a torso X-ray per minute’s worth. More people straggle in to the shelter Donte has found, a few of them carrying bits of metal or wood they’ve used to attempt to shield their genitals from the invisible shower of charged particles. Hope I didn’t catch a mutant out there, they say almost invariably, as common a cliché as how about that weather or hold my beer and watch this.

One of the latecomers, covered and veiled like him, wanders over to Donte, begins to turn to sit, hesitates…

I arrived at that cover art by fiddling around with a picture I took today in GIMP, trying different effects, until I hit upon something pleasingly trippy and retro. For a moment I thought, ‘hey, that’s sort of weird looking’… but a little weird is GOOD for science fiction. So I went with it.

Here’s the blurb for He Shot First:

Dan Tippdale is a human among aliens on an unfamiliar world. A bar fight lands him in jail — and he shot first. The charge might not be murder, but that might not matter — from the looks of things, he might not live to stand trial. And then there’s the matter of his lawyer, who has something big in common with the alien Dan shot…

Plus, this one is really short, under 2000 words, and therefore I’ve made it FREE.

The cover art for this one is much more straightforward than for the other, but the dark sky and rising rocket reflect some key imagery from the story very well. And when my covers aren’t trippy, they’re straightforward.

The blurb for Waiting For:

Rudy has the honor of being one of the first permanent human colonists on Mars. Sonya plans to follow him in a year so they can be among the first to be married on the Red Planet… but Rudy’s brother Aaron has been keeping a secret that may throw those plans into a cocked hat…

———

So, there you have it, my newest two offerings, self-published titles #61 and #62. Both science fiction, one (Waiting For) in a nearer future, much closer to home, and the other set far away in a future where humans haven’t just encountered alien life, but are familiar enough with aliens to run afoul of their legal systems.

I’m working on a short story set in the same universe as a previous short story. No big deal, authors do that all the time, right? Well… I’m somewhere north of seventy short stories to my name and I’ve only done that ONCE before. This is number two, so it’s still sort of new ground for me.

Mentally, I’ve been kicking around the idea of using this universe of mine for some more stories. It’s a take on the ‘wormholes transport ships across interstellar distances’ trope of science fiction. ‘The Craze’, as I think of my model (think cracks in the glaze of pottery type of craze, not the crazy kind of craze) transports ships farther than usual for the trope. As in, finding a Craze transit so short that you land in the same galaxy you started in is very, very rare. More often, you end up outside of the local group of galaxies.

Which is a lot of setup for this particular turn of phrase, which I enjoy because comparing intergalactic travel with small rodents that plague the lawn-conscious is nerdily fun:

The Craze, the web of faster than light transit lines that underlaid the fabric of the observable universe like gopher burrows under a lawn, made it possible for human beings to exist so incredibly far from the cradle of humankind.

In this case, our hero is visiting a world called ‘Outblack’, a world remarkable in the fact that it circles a rogue star drifting through the deeps not just between galaxies, but between galactic groups. Imagine the luscious darkness of THAT sky.

Go read it. You don’t even need an e-reader or e-reader app. You can view the thing as a webpage if you want, by choosing the ‘HTML’ option. It’s about 2,500 words, you can finish it while having a light snack.

According to the very recent article pictured above, there is a very high likelihood that there is at least one habitable, Earthlike planet within 20 light years of Earth, and possibly more. The number of habitable planets out there may be a lot higher than our best guessers had been guessing.

It’s by no means certain that there’s a beautiful and fallow new Earth sitting next door (or as next door as interstellar distances get), but this is encouraging to wild-eyed dreamers like me. We could be one really good technological advance from going and taking a look.

If we don’t mind our grandchildren being the ones to look down on a new planet and decide whether or not it’s good to live on, we could go now. Or now-ish. I’d imagine it would take a couple or five decades, if we were so inclined and assuming our technology stays basically the same, to dig out the guts of an asteroid to make a decent sized generation ship habitat capable of carrying a few thousand people and go take a look. It could be enough to start a new Human Race franchise at a new location. It looks like the human population has been that small in the fairly recent past.

I’d sign up. But I’m guessing my family might want me to discuss it with them first…